FRED’s Nicolò Comotti interviews actress Evgenya Mandzhieva, who plays the leading role in the film The Gulls directed by Ella Manzheeva, which was presented in the Forum section of the 65th Berlin International Film Festival.

Internationally acclaimed top model Evgeniya Mandzhieva talks with us about making her cinematic acting debut in The Gulls, and talks about the challenges of Ella Manzheeva’s project and the process of getting into the character – which required her, among other things to ditch her “sophisticated” lifestyle and learn Kalmyk…and even become a baker for seven days!

Plot:The Gulls tells the story of Elza, who lives in a small town in the Republic of Kalmykia on the Caspian Sea. Another year comes to an end, it’s cold and the steppe is covered in a thin layer of snow. When her husband, who makes a living from illegal fishing, asks her one night what she did during the day, she lies. She wasn’t at her mother’s, but at the bus stop. She thought of leaving – to find out what it might be to escape the infinite expanse of her dreary small world. But she didn’t dare; instead she stays and withdraws into herself, unconcerned by who might see. One day, her husband doesn’t return from a dangerous boat trip. It is said that a fisherman only returns if he has a woman waiting for him and that seagulls are the souls of the missing.